Summary

This compilation of nearly 50 recent essays and reviews by one of America's leading literary figures demonstrates Joyce Carol Oates's passionate and wide-ranging interests. Fairytales ancient and modern, the literature of serial killers, surrealist art, boxing--these are but a few of the subjects to which Oates turns her formidable intelligence. From studies of literary and art history, to examinations of the creative process and therole of the artist in society, Oates's eloquent and thought-provoking commentaries remind us of the pleasures of the essay form. Included here are significant studies of such literary personalities as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler, Sylvia Plath and Paul Bowles, among others. Where I've Been, and Where I'm Going also features Oates's writings about her own work, including essays on Expensive People, Wonderland, and Foxfire. Like her 1988 collection, (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities, these fascinating essays are a privileged glimpse into one of the most fascinating minds of our era.

Author Notes

Joyce Carol Oates was born on June 16, 1938 in Lockport, New York. She received a bachelor's degree in English from Syracuse University and a master's degree in English from the University of Wisconsin.

She is the author of numerous novels and collections of short stories. Her works include We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, Bellefleur, You Must Remember This, Because It Is Bitter, Because It Is My Heart, Solstice, Marya : A Life, and Give Me Your Heart. She has received numerous awards including the National Book Award for Them, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Lifetime Achievement in American Literature. She was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with her title Lovely, Dark, Deep. She also wrote a series of suspense novels under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith. In 2015, her novel The Accursed became listed as a bestseller on the iBooks chart.

She worked as a professor of English at the University of Windsor, before becoming the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. She and her late husband Raymond J. Smith operated a small press and published a literary magazine, The Ontario Review.

(Bowker Author Biography) Joyce Carol Oates is one of the most eminent and prolific literary figures and social critics of our times. She has won the National Book Award and several O. Henry and Pushcart prizes. Among her other awards are an NEA grant, a Guggenheim fellowship, the PEN/Malamud Lifetime Achievement Award, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Lifetime Achievement in American Literature.

Booklist Review

Oates is a veritable Niagara. This intellectually weighty yet thoroughly enjoyable volume is a collection of sophisticated and original critical works written over the course of the last several years, during which she also wrote several novels and many short stories, poems, and plays. Her primary subjects are the artist's role in society and the "beguiling mystery of literary creation," themes she examines in expert essays about the works of Emily Dickinson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac, Paul Bowles, P. D. James, John Edgar Wideman, and Grace Paley, among others. Oates is deeply well-read and curious about all forms of writing, including genre fiction, and her essay "Killer Kids," a piece inspired by a reconsideration of William March's nearly forgotten 1954 novel, The Bad Seed, couldn't be more topical in the wake of recent high-school tragedies. Oates also discusses painting, boxing, and serial killers, and the great torrent of her writing powers the minds of her readers just as the energy generated by water-whirled turbines lights up millions of homes. --Donna Seaman

Publisher's Weekly Review

All of these approximately 50 essays, reviews and prose pieces, produced over the last decade by one of America's most prolific and respected writers, have been previously published in such distinguished venues as the New York Review of Books and Salmagundi. Indeed, Oates's reputation as a serious, incisive writer needs no bolstering; this collection instead reinforces what we already know. Oates's insightful and seemingly inexhaustible commentary alights on an impressive range of subjects. The literary and the lurid go hand in hand in several of the more major pieces, including Oates's well-known New York Review of Books essay on the creative urges of serial killers ("I Had No Other Thrill or Happiness"), and a piece on fairy tales and their female reinterpreters, featuring Anne Sexton and Angela Carter ("In Olden Times, When Wishing Was Having"). Though she claims not to be unduly biased by her gender, Oates does address many feminist concerns, including misogyny in Raymond Chandler's work and the fear of domesticity in Updike's Rabbit series. Other subjects include Grace Paley's "miniaturist art," the morality of boxing, the mysteries of P.D. James and Dorothy Sayers and the tragic vision of Joseph Conrad. Despite what one may assume, these earnest pieces are not philosophically dense readingÄin fact, some of Oates's more theoretical contentions would not hold up to rigorous traditional critique. Rather, her prose pieces gain their intensity from their laserlike focus on the concrete details of human sensibility. This unwavering focus unites all Oates's disparate topics, but it also gives the book a uniformity of mood and tone. As with most gatherings of occasional pieces, this admirable collection is best read in small doses. (July) FYI: Broke Heart Blues (Forecasts, May 17), Oates's latest novel, will also be released by Dutton in July. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Library Journal Review

A professor of humanities at Princeton, Oates has written numerous novels, short stories, poems, plays, and essays and won many important literary awards. These 50 pieces have been published previously, in the past few years, in such places as the New York Times, Kenyon Review, and London Review of Books. They include literary criticism, book reviews, and introductions to books, emphasizing authors and the art or act of writing. There are essays on Jack Kerouac, P.D. James, Emily Dickinson, and Edward Hopper, among others. Of her own view of authorship, Oates says: "So to me any act of the imagination, no matter how coolly calibrated or layered in that uniquely adult vision we call irony, is first of all an act of childlike adventure and wonder." This collection may be of interest to academic or public libraries.ÄNancy Patterson Shires, East Carolina Univ., Greenville, NC (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.